Young Wives (41 page)

“Objection, Your Honor.” Angie was up and really firm. Her voice was almost raised. “This witness is not listed, and there was adequate discovery time to inform us. I must insist on her not being called, or request a continuance.”

Michelle watched as the judge looked at Mr. Creskin. “Counselor, you know better than to spring a surprise on this court,” he admonished.
Good
, Michelle thought.
I hope he gets the judge good and mad
.

“Your Honor, this was a witness I could only locate yesterday, and the well-being of the children as my only concern, I felt that you would want to hear any testimony that would clarify the Jackson domestic situation.”

The judge seemed to pause and consider. Then he said, “Objection overruled.”

Michelle couldn’t believe it. Anne Cherril was going to be allowed to take the stand to talk about her boss? And talk she did. It was like a nightmare.

“Oh, nothing was more important to Mrs. Jackson than her job,” she gabbled, bitter as old tea. Jada must be beside herself, Michelle thought. “She put in the hours, I’ll give her that,” Anne said, though she sounded as if she didn’t want to give Jada anything—just take things away. “She was
always
at work. Sometimes those kids would ring up and she wouldn’t even take their calls.”

Michelle wished she had a gun. She’d shoot the woman. She really would.

“I felt sorry for them, I did,” Anne went on. “Sometimes I talked to them myself just to give them someone to talk to.” It went on and on. Michelle got so angry that more than once she let a noise escape her lips, a low moan. Anne’s testimony was untrue, unfair, and biased, yet Michelle knew it was doing damage, big time. All those years of resentment that Anne had carried, all those years of jealousy as a black woman moved up the ladder ahead of her, spewed out in nasty little twisted factoids. “I don’t have children of my own,” Anne admitted when Angie began cross-examination, “but if I did, I would have given them a lot more time than I did my job.”

Michelle shivered. She wondered which neighbors, coworkers, or friends would speak against Frank and against her at Frank’s trial. And she wondered what they would have to say. She suspected some people Frank knew would have a lot more reasons than Anne had to testify against him. Poor Jada. It was all horrible. What would a trial do to Michelle and her family? She shivered and put her hand in her pocket. She took out another Xanax and slipped it under her tongue.

There was another surprise for Angie, and one worse than Anne Cherril. Creskin called a Miss Abigail Murchison. Angie searched the list of witnesses, panicking and again, but the name didn’t appear anywhere. “Who the hell is she?” Angie asked. Creskin couldn’t keep getting away with this.

Jada nudged her with a face Angie didn’t like to see, and whispered, “Kevon’s kindergarten teacher from last year. I tried to get her fired.”

Angie objected and again was overruled. She grabbed a pen and began scribbling notes as Miss Murchison told how Jada showed up at school, was almost incoherent, completely out of control and irrational. “She appeared to be high on something,” Miss Murchison said.

“Objection, Your Honor,” Angie almost shouted. The objection was sustained, but the woman continued to do her worst: Mrs. Jackson had been vituperative; she had made threats against her; she had thrown books around the classroom. When it was Angie’s turn to cross-examine, she asked for another brief recess. Clearly annoyed, Sneed gave them only five minutes. She huddled with Michael and Jada.

“She’s a nut,” Jada said. “I don’t think she ever taught a black child before. She used to make Kevon wash his hands five and six times after lunch and still say that they were dirty. She didn’t have a single book for story time with a person of color in it, except for a copy of
Little Black Sambo
. God knows where she got
that
one from. Anyway, I went in to see her and I was damn mad. I
did
throw a book, but it was
Sambo
. I also took her in about a dozen other ones. And I did tell her I would do my best to get her fired if she ever made him wash his hands more than once.”

“Did you see the principal?” Michael asked.

“Oh yes. She won’t show up. She’s a reasonable woman who doesn’t ever want to get involved. But the situation eventually straightened up. I also sent a letter to her and the Board of Education. It’s all on record.”

Angie began to feel buried under the weight of all of this. She had two minutes left to make her strategy. She looked at Michael.

“With time,” he said, “we could easily counteract all of this.” He looked at Angie. “But we don’t have time and Creskin has really played it dirty by keeping his shots surprises.”

Just then Michelle approached them. “God, I can’t believe it,” she said. “Miss Murchinson! She gave my son trouble right after my legal stuff began. She let him sit in his clothes after he wet his pants. I can testify to that. Do you want me to? I will.”

Angie looked at her watch. Oh boy. Creskin would make a carnival out of that:
So how soon after your drug bust did this happen? And would you show the court your bruised face and tell us how you got it
?

“We have to just move on with something better,” she said. She and Michael looked at one another. Michelle leaned over Jada and hugged her, then said something awful about Anne Cherril.

“It’s taking a big risk, but it might be all I have left,” Angie said quietly to Michael.

“Michelle as a witness? He can only question her about what you bring up if she’s your witness,” Michael said. “But if he somehow manages to open up the drug stuff, he’ll cook your goose.”

“I hope my goose isn’t already cooked.”

In cross-examination, Miss Murchinson didn’t exactly admit to being a bigot, but she was easily flustered. She did acknowledge that Jada had registered a protest with the principal and the Board of Education. Angie couldn’t get her to admit that she read
Little Black Sambo
to the class—Miss Murchinson said she couldn’t remember all the books she’d read the children—but she did admit that many parents, when upset about their children’s problems, came to the school very angry. Angie also asked if Miss Murchinson had ever heard from the children’s father, and she had to admit that she hadn’t. Angie presented it all as a strength, an indication of Jada’s commitment and involvement with her kids.

The social worker, Mrs. Elroy, was not as bad as Angie expected. Actually, she was terrible, but easy to take down if only she’d get a little luck. She bristled with outrage during Creskin’s questions. Elroy’s drug test request and some of her other testimony was damaging, but under cross-examination she harangued the court about how working mothers should not be raising children. How motherhood was a full-time job, blah, blah, blah. She clearly sounded more than a few cards short of a full deck, and when Angie pulled in Mrs. Elroy’s colleague, she figured Elroy’s credibility would be demolished.

Luckily, Judge Sneed didn’t have any patience for sermons on the box. Angie felt she’d done a fairly good job of neutralizing her, and had submitted as evidence the results of the daily drug tests that they had performed at the state laboratory. Still, Angie was acutely aware that Mrs. Innico, the witness from social services who would blow Elroy out of the water, even now had yet to appear.

Bill kept calling, and kept reporting that no one could reach the witness. Angie actually felt queasy, about ready to lose her turkey sandwich, because Mrs. Innico still hadn’t arrived by the end of Mrs. Elroy’s testimony. She would have liked to begin her witnesses with her, and the woman had promised she’d be there at lunchtime. Yet it was past two and she still hadn’t made an appearance. When Creskin was finished, the judge gave them a ten-minute recess to prepare for their witnesses. Angie asked Michael what he thought was happening with Mrs. Innico.

“I think what’s happening is what sometimes happens. Sometimes witnesses don’t show. Just because it’s important to you and your client doesn’t mean that they don’t get flat tires, or drunk at lunch, or miss a train, or need a tooth pulled.” Mike shrugged. “Sometimes they just forget, or chicken out. She might get here. And we’ve got Anna Pollasky from Yale. She’s fabulous, and she’s sitting in the hallway. Why don’t we lead with the big guns?”

Angie thought it over. “No. We go with Clinton Jackson. I have to nail the lying son-of-a-bitch to the wall.”

Jada felt as if, bit by bit, she was turning to ice, or perhaps stone. From the moment early this morning when she’d walked into the courthouse and seen her husband, dressed in a new suit and wearing a pair of hornrimmed glasses—the man didn’t
need
glasses—she’d felt as if something beyond terrible was about to go on. But as the day had progressed, she doubted her own reality. She doubted everyone else’s, too. Each participant in this charade was taking a view so different from reality that Jada had to close her eyes more than once, take a deep breath, and remind herself that she was not crazy.

After a meal that she couldn’t eat, and after betrayals by Anne and that teacher from hell, Jada was beyond anger. She was frozen. For some reason, she thought of the TV shows her husband liked, the ones where actors played the parts of criminals while real police and FBI reenacted raids and arrests. Fictional shows pretending to be real life. All that had been presented during this endless day was a fictional show that had nothing to do with her real life.

When at last Clinton took the stand, he looked better than he had on the day she first met him. He was sworn in.

“Before I begin direct, I would just like the plaintiff to identify himself,” Creskin said. In a strong voice, Clinton gave his name and address. More amazing was that under Creskin’s questioning, she watched while Clinton became the Perfect American Black Man. He had his own company, he had built a house for his family in a fine neighborhood, and though he was undergoing some pressures in the marketplace right now, while dealing with the bigotry of both suppliers and prospective clients, he was confident he would survive. He spent all the time he wasn’t out there looking for new contracts with his children. He provided all their care.

He and, he implied, their children had been abandoned by the wife and mother of the home. “Sometime I feel like she got something to prove against me. Or that she got a plan that we just don’t fit into,” he said, sounding sad.

During Clinton’s testimony, Jada felt the ice melt in her chest and turn into something a lot hotter than molten steel. She just wanted to get up, throw herself across the table, and in three strides be in front of her husband’s face. She’d slap it until those stupid glasses flew off and his lying mouth was silenced. But instead she just sat there. She couldn’t take notes because her hands were trembling too hard. Every now and then, Angie gave her a small tap on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry. We’ll get him,” Angie murmured. “I’ll just get a few of the facts out now. Then I’ll call him to the stand later and take him apart.”

And that’s what she did. Calmly, but as efficiently as a surgeon slicing into infected flesh, Angie opened Clinton up and pulled out all sorts of nasty bits. She asked his income for the last five years, year by year. It went from minuscule to nonexistent. She asked for the names of recent prospective clients he had given proposals to and he couldn’t give her any. She even asked if he had a word processor, business cards, a pager, or any standard office equipment. Reluctantly, to each question he had to admit he didn’t.

“In the interest of brevity, I’ll dismiss the witness now, but reserve the right to recall him later,” Angie said. She sat down while a far less cocky Clinton left the stand and almost shuffled to his seat.

Jada felt a little bit better and trusted that Angie could do even more dire things later. Next there was some discussion between the judge and George Creskin, and a large TV monitor was rolled in. “If it pleases the court, I’m about to show a video tape taken two weeks ago. Mr. Jackson’s wife had two hours of visitation with the children and was returning them.”

Angie stood up. “Objection, Your Honor. We were not made aware of this exhibit or its contents. We completely object to—”

“In the interest of brevity, Your Honor, I think we can agree a picture is worth a thousand words.”

“Your Honor, there’s absolutely no call for this and we strongly object.”

“Sidebar, Your Honor,” Creskin said.

“What’s a sidebar?” Jada asked Michael. Angie got up and walked to the judge’s bench. White people.

“We didn’t know,” Jada heard Angie whispering.

“…sent it…didn’t get it?” was all Jada heard Creskin reply. She looked at Michael for some reassurance and he rubbed her back with his left hand. “…faxed confirmation, sir,” Jada heard, and saw Creskin hand over a piece of paper.

“…problem with machine…but, Your Honor…” Now Angie sounded defensive. This couldn’t be good.

“…postal receipt right here…” Creskin snapped.

“…we can’t allow…” was the last she heard from Angie. Then the judge said something and her friend turned around and walked back to the table. Jada didn’t like the look on Angie’s face. Was it due to the new evidence, or because she had to stand so close to Creepy Creskin?

“If this was a trial, I couldn’t allow this evidence to be submitted, but since it’s only a
pendente lite
hearing and the defense has presented to me proof of mailing, notification, and the like, the defense may present this exhibit.”

George Creskin, in a move rather like a technology magician, pulled out a small remote control and hit a button.

Jada watched the screen fill, and on it her own car pulled up to the front of her mother-in-law’s dump. It must have been the visit when she took them to the house. Clinton had a close-up of Kevon hanging his head and crying, running toward the camera, away from Jada. Then there was a close-up of Shavonne, her face angry, pulling away from her mother’s hands, refusing to hug her. The shot continued to reveal that even Sherrilee was crying, but that was only because she’d just been woken from her nap.

Jada saw it all, but couldn’t believe her eyes. “The children were crying because I told them I had to take them back to their grandmother. They had expected to stay with me that night,” she whispered fiercely to Angie. Then, in a terrible insight that came far too late, Jada wondered if they’d been specifically told they were staying with her—told that so they’d be so upset. Could Clinton be that clever, that diabolical?